flâneur

Tianhui Xu

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on the atlas — 16

highlights — 15

  • To love is to let yourself be remade. To become someone else, not because you were incomplete, but because there are parts of you still waiting to be made real in the presence of another. And when you love someone like that, you offer them the same possibility: to explore their hidden selves and latent worlds, and to find, in your gaze, a home for what they discover.
    some parts of you only emerge for certain people - by maja
  • Schools are a compression of community. They try to squeeze the key knowledge and skills of an entire community into one building, while simultaneously taking care of kids so parents can work. Yet when I look across the best “Wrenesday” projects we’ve done, the common theme is that we got into community, in contact with people and places around us. In other words, we’ve been “de-compressing” community.
    Am I starting a school...again? - by Chris Balme
  • “Asking for help makes me a burden” → “People really appreciate being asked and valued for their expertise.” “Asking for help makes me look weak or incompetent” → “Demonstrating that I know what I don’t know is a key leadership competence.” “People will think less of me if I ask for help” → “People respect and appreciate my vulnerability, and expressing my needs will allow them to do the same.” “My boss will be annoyed that I can’t do it alone” → “Leaders want my work to succeed and need to know when that’s at risk.”
    On asking for help (even when you really don't want to)
  • When done well, asking for help does not diminish your ownership or credibility. It increases your agency, builds higher-trust relationships, and models a willingness to put your vulnerability aside for the sake of the work
    On asking for help (even when you really don't want to)
  • “The exhaustion of subconsciously assuming I have to do everything on my own robbed me of agency, joy, and so much energy in my work. Shifting this has been radical for me in terms of my relationship to myself and to my work.”
    On asking for help (even when you really don't want to)
  • Yet Facebook seems to make us all the same. Its format and conventions strip us of all but the most superficial expressions of individuality, such as which particular photo of a beach or mountain range we select as our background image.
    Opinion | The Tyranny of Convenience - The New York Times
  • Most of the powerful and important technologies created over the past few decades deliver convenience in the service of personalization and individuality. Think of the VCR, the playlist, the Facebook page, the Instagram account. This kind of convenience is no longer about saving physical labor — many of us don’t do much of that anyway. It is about minimizing the mental resources, the mental exertion, required to choose among the options that express ourselves.
    Opinion | The Tyranny of Convenience - The New York Times
  • We need to consciously embrace the inconvenient — not always, but more of the time. Nowadays individuality has come to reside in making at least some inconvenient choices. You need not churn your own butter or hunt your own meat, but if you want to be someone, you cannot allow convenience to be the value that transcends all others. Struggle is not always a problem. Sometimes struggle is a solution. It can be the solution to the question of who you are.
    Opinion | The Tyranny of Convenience - The New York Times
  • There is a natural human tendency to make the next step an upward one. He ends up falling for a common trap highlighted by behavioral economists: people tend to systematically overvalue near term over long term rewards. This effect seems to be even stronger in more ambitious people. Their ambition seems to make it hard for them to forgo the nearby upward step. People early in their career should learn from computer science: meander some in your walk (especially early on), randomly drop yourself into new parts of the terrain, and when you find the highest hill, don’t waste any more time on the …
    cdixon | Climbing the wrong hill
  • I’ve learnt, that if I really, really believe in people, they already have the tools to be well, all I need is to create that space for their reality.
    moments - by Ha Tran Nguyen Phuong - excavation
  • Realizing, again & again, that people know what to do, deep in their hearts, I just need to guide them there.
    moments - by Ha Tran Nguyen Phuong - excavation
  • How do you design a game? 1. Goals 2. Emotions 3. Controls 4. Toys 5. Flow
    Rahul Vohra's 7 principles of game design
  • It is now possible to craft, test and refine practical models of game design built from observable patterns of play. We can describe what the player does and how the game reacts. Recently, we’ve begun to crack open why players react to certain stimuli and are able to create models that predict pleasure and frustration.
    The Chemistry Of Game Design
  • With the model created, we started taking daily snapshots of data to create a history of how all of these user buckets and retention rates had evolved on a day-by-day basis over the past several years. With this data, we could create a forward-looking model and then perform a sensitivity analysis to predict which levers would have the biggest impact on DAU growth. We ran a simulation for each rate, where we moved a single rate 2% every quarter for three years, holding all the other rates constant.
    How Duolingo reignited user growth - by Jorge Mazal
  • When we move to a new place, we can’t wait for a social network to form, we need to create it. From having a platform to reach out, to casting a wider net, to becoming the person throwing the party instead of simply attending. You control your destiny in a new city — the key is to make sure you’re an active force in it.
    How to make friends in a new city | by Stephen Turban | Medium